James Taranto has a great column about how all the left-wing vitriol over the Citizens United case really is just an attempt to maintain the once monopoly power of left-wing corporations over political speech.

News flash — The New York Times is a corporation which protects its electioneering for liberal causes under the banner of press freedom, while seeking to deny other corporations similar rights.

A corporate division has once again exercised its First Amendment rights to argue that corporations don’t have First Amendment rights. This time, however, the New York Times Co. claims to have discovered a loophole that protects its First Amendment rights.

In an editorial today, the Times Co.’s eponymous flagship newspaper answers Justice Samuel Alito, who in a terrific speech last week at the Federalist Society in Washington penetratingly (“speciously,” according to the Times) defended the court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That 5-4 ruling struck down portions of two laws that imposed government censorship on political speech by corporations and unions (though they made an exception for “media corporations” such as the New York Times Co. and News Corp., which publishes The Wall Street Journal and this website).

Alito elaborated an argument this column made in January 2010, just after he and his colleagues handed down Citizens United. He noted that many landmark free-speech decisions vindicated the rights of corporations, including two that involved the New York Times Co. …

The Times Co.’s notion that only certain types of corporations are “deserving of constitutional protection” is pernicious. It recasts freedom of expression as a privilege rather than a right. It assigns to the government the authority to determine which corporations are to be favored with the “media” distinction allowing them to engage in political debate.

The Times Co. wants itself and similar corporations to enjoy a monopoly on free speech. The only way to accomplish that is through a regime in which the government effectively licenses the press. That would be an anathema to America’s constitutional tradition.

The NY Times is the enemy of freedom with which it doesn’t agree. Which means that it is the enemy of freedom.

Reminds me of an article I read yesterday about a company called the Hobby Lobby. Apparently it’s a Christian-owned company, and it filed a lawsuit objecting to Obamacare’s requirement that it pay for its employees to have insurance coverage that includes “free” contraceptives and abortion pills. A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled against the company, saying that First Amendment religious protections don’t extend to corporations.

After reading the article, I checked my copy of the Constitution. Mine must have a misprint, because it does not include that part of the First Amendment which says Congress shall make no law infringing the free exercise of religion . . . except when the citizens seeking to exercise those religious freedoms have organized themselves as corporations, in which case Congress can make any law it damn well pleases.

Or perhaps that missing clause is one of those invisible emanations from imaginary penumbras that only liberal judges can discern.

Perhaps the Editors of The New York Times can tell us where in the First Amendment that the freedom of speech is restricted to persons or any particular groups. The Editors concluded:

The Citizens United majority never explained why any corporation that does not have a press function warrants the same free speech rights as a person. Neither did Justice Alito. Meanwhile, the false equivalence of money and speech put forward by Citizens United and the money it unleashed is wreaking havoc in our politics.

The First Amendment is not something which guarantees the freedom of speech, but, rather, states that the Congress (and now, the States, via incorporation) have no authority to make any law which abridges the freedom of speech. There are no references to persons or corporations or anything which identifies any categorization to who or what is speaking.

The NY Times, nor any organ of the left — including the lunatic this country elected president — could care less about the ‘First Amendment.’ It’s merely been a tool for them to use to get them where they are today.